1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to the field of electronic data processing and data communications systems, and to data processing system networks (referred to as computer networks hereinafter) supporting electronic messaging (hereinafter referred to as electronic mail or “e-mail” for short) systems. More specifically, the invention concerns improvements to shared e-mail systems.
2. Background Art
With the growth of computer networks, e-mail has become an extremely fast, economic, easy to use and thus extremely popular and pervasive interpersonal communication means, for both private and professional purposes. In particular, thanks to the impressive diffusion of the Internet in the past fifteen years, Internet Protocol (IP) e-mail nowadays provides a standard communication mechanism for millions of computer users. Nomadicity and the advent of wireless networks, together with the addition of packet-switched capabilities to mobile telephony networks have further increased the diffusion of e-mail as a communication resource.
Generally speaking, e-mail systems are based on the client-server paradigm. By means of any one of the several, commercially available e-mail client software tools (e-mail clients), designed to be installed and executed on personal computers, workstations, portable computers, smart mobile phones, such as IBM Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, just to cite few examples, the management of e-mail messages is a rather simple and user-friendly task.
Most commonly, users who wish to take advantage of e-mail systems creates their own e-mail accounts at an e-mail service provider, like the e-mail server of their Internet access provider, or the e-mail server of the data processing infrastructure of their employer.
However, there are cases in which a single and same e-mail account is shared, owned by two or more, possibly several users; the e-mail account in thus referred to as a “shared e-mail account” (shared e-mail systems are sometime also denoted “task IDs”, when they are intended for a specific task, like in the case of ticketing systems).
The use of e-mail has become so wide and popular, that shared e-mail systems are for example commonly set up by companies or agencies for providing a single, unique interface to help desks, customer care or customer support teams; by sending an e-mail message to the single e-mail account of the support team, a user actually submits his/her request to an entire team of people, not merely to a single person; all the persons of the team have access to the mailbox of the shared e-mail account, and thus the customer's request may be taken care of by the member of the support team that has a lower workload, or that is more experienced in that field, or is physically closer to the location of the user (if for example resolution of the customer's problem requires visiting the premises of the latter).
Present e-mail systems are quite flexible, because they allow customization at several levels. For example, interacting with the e-mail server through his/her e-mail client, or through a web interface, a user being the owner of an e-mail account can properly configure, according to his/her needs and/or wishes, the e-mail account, for example setting if and when e-mail messages can be deleted from the mailbox, setting, as a default or for selected messages only, a request for receipt confirmation to be presented to the recipients when the latter display the messages, setting auto-reply messages, useful for example to inform other persons, sending e-mail messages thereto, that the user is not/will not be able to read (and respond to) the received messages, because on holiday or on business trip or absent for any reason.